NER Classics | A Dream of Ezra Pound | J. Allyn Rosser

I’d eaten dark chocolate, reading late at night.They introduced me, and I still hadn’t readAll the Cantos. Somehow he knew this on sight.

Still, his large old hand shook mine; I stayed With him to kiss that wistful dented cheek;He was shyly pleased, beard glowing, and said:
(I couldn’t hear. His voice was oddly weak, As if it came from behind him.) Police Were there. He’d come back down, or up, to speak

On God. So he was not completely at ease When my colleagues nattered on and onAbout their flatly mispronounced bêtises;

But he was polite- extremely- to everyone! Had he learned the hard way from his long bedIn Saint Elizabeths, lying there alone,

To nod when it was best to nod? He did. It went over well with the academicians, Beamish boys. At last he shook his head-

His voice resumed the vibrant, hallowing insistenceI’d expected, though much softer, bereaved, In earnest response to some jargonous nonsense:

“Yes yes, we think in order to know, or perceive- And in this we are sometimes, it seems, successful- But we believe in order to believe“

He said this in worn sorrow, in sorrow distressful. He said this, E.P. No madness up his sleeve. “No god,” he said. “Nothing but what we may leave.”

Confluences

After collaborating on the autobiographies of some of the world’s most famous subjects, Peter Knobler turns towards home and writes about memory, music, and his mother. “When I was growing up we had spent many Sunday mornings in our Greenwich Village home listening to Mahalia Jackson, Harry Belafonte, the Weavers—records that now sat on her shelves like tablets.”